Microsoft Pumps Windows Azure as Top Cloud Choice for Developers

By Darryl K. Taft |
Posted 2010-07-14

WASHINGTON - Microsoft's Windows Azure is for developers.

Well, that is what the head of Microsoft's Windows
Azure team said. Microsoft has positioned Windows Azure as the "general
purpose" cloud platform. At the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC)
here, key Microsoft officials delivered targeted messaging about the
Windows Azure platform as the more mainstream, general-purpose cloud
platform as compared to competing offerings such as Amazon Web
Services, Google App Engine and Salesforce.com's solutions, among others.

"At Microsoft we're pulling platform as a service
(PAAS) and infrastructure as a service (IAAS) together in Windows
Azure," said Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business at
Microsoft. "Windows Azure is the world's first general purpose cloud
platform," he added.

In an interview with eWEEK, Amitabh Srivastava,
senior vice president of Microsoft's Server and Cloud Division,
explained Microsoft's positioning versus cloud competitors such as Google or Amazon Web Services.

"Google is a platform as a service, but it's only
restricted to two languages - Python and Java. You have to fit in with
the way they do things. We're being general purpose. Amazon is an
infrastructure as a service; they provide no tools support. How you
develop your applications is your concern. You're on your own. We
support any language and multiple frameworks. We provide a rich
ecosystem of technology or you can use open source software like MySQL
or Apache. Our approach is we don't put any shackles on the developer."

In a separate meeting with eWEEK at WPC, Robert
Wahbe, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Server and Tools
marketing, amplified the differences between Windows Azure and
competitors, saying, "We allow you to use any language to build your
apps, including native... You can use C and C++ to build apps for Windows
Azure. You won't find that in many other platforms. We're the general
purpose guys."

Moreover, Wahbe said Salesforce.com, another Microsoft cloud computing competitor, also is limited to a
particular language in Java. "And their collaboration with WMware means they can allow developers to manage virtual machines, but I don't think developers want to have to do that," he said.

Meanwhile, Srivastava, who was part of the initial
"Red Dog" development team that created the Windows Azure cloud
computing platform, said from its inception Windows Azure targeted
developers.

"When we were developing Azure from day one it was
done for developers," he said. "You have to allow developers to bring
their skills, their current set of skills, to the cloud. So we said
developers should get to choose tha language they want to use. You can
use any environment you want. You can use Visual Studio or you can do
the entire development in Eclipse. You can't pigeonhole developers into
one or two languages or one or two frameworks. Just because our lineage
is Windows Server doesn't mean we will restrict you to using C# or a
Microsoft language."

In addition, to make things easier for developers,
Srivastava said Microsoft has encapsulated the core development
concepts for Windows Azure into a software development kit (SDK). That
means "a developer, before taking an application to the cloud, can
develop their application and run it on the PC." This enables
developers to test their apps and to single out bugs that might not
otherwise be caught before the application was deployed. "You're not
going to catch all the bugs, but you'll catch many or even most of
them. Debugging in a cloud environment is hard. So we wanted to enable
a developer to take their application to market as fast as they can."

Srivastava said the technology that became the
Windows Azure SDK started as an internal tool used by the Red Dog team
to buid and test applications for the cloud platform. It was known as
Red Dog in a box, he said. "Red Dog in a box is the thing we used
ourselves."

However, the "Red Dog in a box" Srivastava speaks
of in this context is not to be confused with the new Windows Azure
appliance that Microsoft announced at the WPC. At the WPC event,
Microsoft announced the Windows Azure platform appliance, the first
turnkey cloud services platform for deployment in customer and service
provider datacenters. Dell, eBay, Fujitsu and HP are
early adopters of a limited production release of the appliance,
Microsoft said.

The appliance is an enabler for developers,
particularly for Microsoft partners with development expertise,
Srivastava said. "The appliance allows partners to provide customers
with their own clouds and to build their own value-add stack on top of
it."

In a statement on the company's new cloud
appliance, Microsoft's Muglia said the software giant is "the first and
only company that offers customers and partners a full range of cloud
capabilities and the flexibility to deploy these services where and how
they wish - whether that is with Microsoft, a service provider, in a
customer datacenter or a combination of all three. Today's introduction
of the Windows Azure platform appliance ushers in a new era of cloud
computing, and we are looking forward to working with our partners to
bring all the benefits of the appliance to our customers and the
business technology industry."

Microsoft officials said the new Windows Azure
platform appliance combines Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure with
Microsoft-specified hardware, enabling on-demand IT capacity and faster
delivery of new applications. Large enterprises and service provider
partners deploying the appliance in their datacenters will have the
benefits of the cloud services that Microsoft offers today, while
maintaining physical control of location, regulatory compliance and
data. In addition, Muglia disclosed new details regarding Microsoft
code name "Dallas," an
information service powered by the Windows Azure platform that provides
developers and information workers access to third-party premium data
sets and Web services.

Al Hilwa, program director for applications
development software at market research firm IDC said he believes
Microsoft is moving ahead at an aggressive pace with its push into the
cloud. Hilwa told eWEEK:

"Unlike with mobile, Microsoft is mobilizing much more quickly with
cloud. The cloud market is IT based and enterprises move much more
slowly than consumers so there is more time to build a deliberate
strategy. Microsoft is targeting cloud on multiple fronts. On the one
hand offering its existing Office applications to the cloud through a
scalable partner model, on the other hand they are targeting
application development either to traditional architectures or to new
elastic cloud architectures with Azure. They are covering all the bases
in a way that only they can because of their on-premises strength. The
impact on their revenue in the long run is still to be determined, but
they have definitely identified this area as one where failure is not
an option."